Sensation and perception

One of the oldest and most difficult questions in science is how we are able to develop an awareness of the world around us from our senses. Topics covered under the title of, 'Sensation and perception' address this very question. Sensation encompasses the processes by which our sense organs (e.g. eyes, ears etc.) receive information from our environment, whereas perception refers to the processes through which the brain selects, integrates, organises and interprets those sensations. The sorts of questions dealt with by psychologists interested in this area include: 'how does visual information get processed by the brain?', 'how is it that I am able to recognise one face out of many many thousands?', and 'what causes visual illusions to occur?: Within New Zealand there are a number of researchers studying visual perception specifically and their research interests range from understanding the biologica

Imagining Alternatives? Latin American Scholarship on International Economic Law and the Global Economic Order

This Article analyzes the role of Latin American international economic law scholarship within the global economic order.  Many of the problems that Latin Americans face today relate to the global economy, such as labor conditions, access to medicine, and the use of natural resources, among others.  The discussion of these problems, however, seldom recognizes the role of international economic law scholarship.  Although the knowledge created by this scholarship may not completely explain why States actively behave in a certain way, it can serve to explain why they may refrain from certain actions.  This Article argues that scholarship on international economic law plays a crucial role in the creation and reproduction of the current global economic order.  If this claim is correct, regional scholarship can do more for Latin America than serving the advisory and litigation needs of States.  By recognizing its role in constituting the global economic order, international economic law scholarship can promote alternative theories and practices that may help Latin America and its people find their place in the global economy

Monads, partial evaluations, and rewriting

Monads can be interpreted as encoding formal expressions, or formal operations in the sense of universal algebra. We give a construction which formalizes the idea of "evaluating an expression partially": for example, "2+3" can be obtained as a partial evaluation of "2+2+1". This construction can be given for any monad, and it is linked to the famous bar construction, of which it gives an operational interpretation: the bar construction induces a simplicial set, and its 1-cells are partial evaluations. We study the properties of partial evaluations for general monads. We prove that whenever the monad is weakly cartesian, partial evaluations can be composed via the usual Kan filler property of simplicial sets, of which we give an interpretation in terms of substitution of terms. In terms of rewritings, partial evaluations give an abstract reduction system which is reflexive, confluent, and transitive whenever the monad is weakly cartesian. For the case of probability monads, partial evaluations correspond to what probabilists call conditional expectation of random variables. This manuscript is part of a work in progress on a general rewriting interpretation of the bar construction.Comment: Originally written for the ACT Adjoint School 2019. To appear in Proceedings of MFPS 202

The perception of surface layout during low level flight

Although it is fairly well established that information about surface layout can be gained from motion cues, it is not so clear as to what information humans can use and what specific information they should be provided. Theoretical analyses tell us that the information is in the stimulus. It will take more experiments to verify that this information can be used by humans to extract surface layout from the 2D velocity flow field. The visual motion factors that can affect the pilot's ability to control an aircraft and to infer the layout of the terrain ahead are discussed